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A-book: a very good, sync-able, alternative addressbook
m_s:
I have conflicting desires. I have been searching for a single security program that would cover everything, so that I could stop running separate Anti-Spyware, Registry protection, and Anti-Trojan programs; but I have at the same time been fragmenting my work-life into various separate segments and moving away from the colossus that is Outlook. I think I have found the answer to my security question now, but that’s not what I’m writing about here; rather, I want to say a few words about one aspect of my efforts to break free of Outlook.
Outlook is a mixed bag. I’ll start by acknowledging that it is an excellent program – I see it now as a suite of programs, a set of very well-considered and well-designed interlinked utilities: calendar, address book, email, notebook, tasklist. Of these, I have mainly used the first three, and that demonstrates one of my reasons for wanting to switch away from it: it’s more than I need; and, as such, it’s bloatware from the start as far as my needs are concerned.
For email, I switched to The Bat!, which can do absolutely everything I need (Outlook could do most of it, but The Bat! does it using far less resources, and it does the bits that Outlook couldn’t do so well – and that Thunderbird couldn’t do at all). I’m a little uncertain about my calendar at the moment: I’m inclining to Calendarscope, but still a little tempted by EssentialPIM (I hope to write either a mini-review or a longer piece on Calendar programs in the not too distant future).
And that’s left me with addressbooks – or, rather, it’s left me without one. The Bat!’s addressbook might be enough for most people: it is email oriented, but it allows you to enter personal and business postal addresses, and it gives you a memo slot for each contact, so you could add any further tags you wanted. But it can’t be synchronised with a Pocket PC, and that’s a fundamental lack for me, as I’m often travelling and need to be able to carry my addressbook without lugging a laptop.
I posted a thread here at DonationCoder, but received few responses; so I did some searching, and turned up a few programs. The one I think I will be going with is A-book ($29.95, plus $19.95 for the optional PocketSyncomatic, both from Xeletrix.com). Here’s why…
A-book: a very good, sync-able, alternative addressbook
The main interface is clean and simple, well laid-out, easy to understand, and visually pleasing. You can easily remove Toolbar, Statusbar, or Book Tree on the left, and you can elect whether or not to display card details, and where to display them.
Within the Book Tree, you can display nested groups of contacts, which makes it very easy for me to separate out addresses from different regions. Another way I could do this would be by establishing a different Category for each region, and then filtering by Category; but I like the simplicity of being able to see all my Indian contacts in one book, my American contacts in another. This distinction points up a major difference in how A-book and Outlook arrange their data – Outlook is more category-oriented, A-book more book-based.
A-book: a very good, sync-able, alternative addressbook
The properties for each contact can be viewed in Simple Mode, where the information is more compactly displayed, or in Advanced Mode, where it is separated into sub-sections – General, Business, Home, Personal, and Other. Each of these sections is pleasantly and spaciously laid out, with a pleasing choice of colors and a thorough selection of types of information recordable.
A-book: a very good, sync-able, alternative addressbook
It is possible from the main interface window to dial telephone numbers of your contacts, a feature that’s of little use to me, but may be to some users. And you can send email via your default email program (which is useful to me); where a contact has more than one email address, a dropdown menu allows you to choose which to send to. Printing is easy from the main window, and can be done as a report or a memo, or directly to envelopes or labels.
A-book supports vCard and Comma- or Tab-Separated imports; and it’s possible also to export to each of these formats. A particularly attractive feature is A-book’s ability to ‘Save for web’, which allows you to export your contacts as a css formatted html file viewable in any web browser. This will be very useful for me in sharing contacts with colleagues – the instance that comes immediately to mind is when I have had someone cover for me during my vacations, and he’s not had access to my addressbooks in that time, and not needed them the rest of the time.
A-book: a very good, sync-able, alternative addressbook
With PocketSyncomatic, it’s easy to synchronise your addressbook with a Pocket PC. Having to pay $19.95 for the sync is likely to turn off a few customers, especially since it’s free with Outlook; but then Outlook is more expensive ($109 for the standalone according to Microsoft.com, though I know it’s available cheaper than that). What I like about PocketSyncomatic is that you can synchronise specific books – again, you can do something similar in Outlook via categories, but I prefer the mode of organising by books instead of categories.
A-book can be set to start automatically when Windows runs; by default, it starts minimized and sits in your system-tray. I don’t understand why some programs seem to use so much more memory than others while they’re effectively inactive in the system-tray – no doubt there’s a technical explanation. (I wish more apps were like Find & Run Robot, for instance, which uses much more memory when it’s active than when it’s taking a break from Finding and Running.)
A-book tends to run at 15-20mb while minimized, which I feel is a bit heavy, but just as it can be set to run automatically, it can also be set not too, and then I can access it when I need it, and close it down when I don’t. This actually is my single reservation – everything else about A-book (when combined with PocketSyncomatic) suits me well, and I’m very happy with it as a solution to my (lack of) addressbook problem.
mouser:
awesome review - the export and import features sound nice, the extra charge for synchronizing not so nice..
i think address books fall into that category of apps where there are probably quite a few good ones that not many people know about - would love to hear more people chime in on what they use for this. me myself i don't have enuogh people i talk to make use of one :huh:
as for the memory use, i personally wouldn't worry so much about it, life's more enjoyable when you dont :)
elpresi:
Hi m_s,
thanks for the very informative review;
I am planning to get a PocketPC pda and have therefore started to consider the possible contact mngr and calendar alternatives to Outlook (which I have never used).
A-book seems great; I am also very interested in your calendar sofware review; I have noticed that Calendarscope can sync to ppc but not so EssentialPIM?
:)
nood question: I just noticed that EssentialPIM can import/export from/to Outlook. Is it possible to export to a Outlook file (without having Outlook installed) and sync from that to PPC?
m_s:
I'm not sure how you would interface that exported data with your pocket pc - activesync works directly with outlook, so if you had just a data file, I don't know how you could get it to speak to the ppc (if you see what I mean).
I will get to work during this week to put up a review of CalendarScope. I've shopped around, and it seems to be the best Calendar. EssentialPIM is nice, and on their forums there was talk of syncing, but I signed up for that weeks back and have heard nothing more.
elpresi:
Thanks for the feedback ;)
Also looking forward to your calendar software review; I have being playing with EPIM and Calendarscope. I like EPIM's hierarchical ToDo list (pro version only though) but I find very unfortunate that they do not show the task list in the calendar view, for easy drag and drop on to the calendar (which Calendarscope does)
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